Your Pac-10 Bowl Game Hell-Clot

Because you don’t know where to go this holiday season, and because you still don’t know how it is that Shane Vereen carried the ball twice as often as Toby Gerhart Saturday, here are your Pacific 10 Conference bowl game scenarii. Act accordingly:

Oregon and Oregon State play for the Rose Bowl a week from Thursday. Winner goes to Pasadena.

That’s the end of what we know for sure. Now comes the fun.

If the favorites win out in the relevant games (Oregon over Oregon State, USC over UCLA and Arizona, Arizona over Arizona State, Cal over Washington), there will be a four-way tie for second and Arizona would finish sixth and go to the Poinsettia Bowl. In such a case, the bowl games take the teams they want, which means that the Holiday Bowl would almost surely take USC, the Sun Bowl would take Cal, the Emerald Bowl would take Stanford and the Las Vegas Bowl would take Oregon State.

But if Oregon State wins, the Holiday would have to take Oregon as the second-place time team, the Sun would take USC, the Emerald would probablt take Cal again, and Stanford would go to Las Vegas.

Ahh, but if Arizona beats USC, it gets weirder still.

Again, if Oregon wins, Oregon goes to the Rose, Cal would probably get the Holiday, Arizona would be the closest to the Sun, Stanford would go the Emerald and Oregon State would go to Las Vegas. If Oregon State wins, Oregon goes to the Holiday, Cal to the Sun, Stanford to the Emerald and Arizona to the Vegas.

But what if there are upsets? If Cal loses to Washington in two weeks, they could drop to either the Poinsettia or an non-aligned bowl, unless USC loses both its games, in which Cal could still end up in the Emerald. Stanford can’t fall below fifth, so the worst they could do is Las Vegas. And if Arizona loses to both USC and Arizona State . . . you know what? The hell with it. Stanford could end up in El Paso, San Francisco or Las Vegas. Cal could end up in El Paso, San Francisco, Las Vegas, San Diego or some other place. Just go see your spouse’s family over the holidays; take a bullet for the team.